Wednesday, July 20, 2011

After a couple of months of hard work we are now happy to introduce the next version of SUSE Studio for onsite installation. It comes in two editions, the Standard Edition, including everything you need to create, share, maintain, and configure your software and virtual appliances, and the Advanced Edition, which additionally supports workloads for System z, the big iron.

For System z we support creating zFCP and DASD images, and you can use all the familiar features of SUSE Studio, adding your software via packages or overlay files, the simple configuration, and of course testdrive for testing and modifying your system just with your browser. The new SUSE Studio also comes with a bunch of other features. It deploys to Amazon EC2 with just a few clicks. It has full versioning capabilities, supporting various release work flows. It includes a local version of SUSE Gallery for sharing your work with your peers and other groups. And there is more, like version 2 of the API, covering all functionality of Studio, support for building SUSE Manager enabled systems, or integration with LDAP for authentication. Most of the features you can try out in the online version of SUSE Studio. If you want to take full control and use Studio behind your firewall, or you want to benefit from the features only available in the onsite version like System z support, the new release of SUSE Studio for onsite installation is made for you. See our new shiny new suse.com website for details how to get it.

The new hosted releases of SUSE Studio come bundled with SUSE Lifecycle Manager and WebYaST. With SUSE Lifecycle Manager you have full control of updates to your appliance. It provides the tools to combine updates of OS, middleware, and your application into one consistent, tested stream of updates, and delivers them to end users.

WebYaST provides a customizable web interface for configuring your appliances. It comes with an elegant interface, which can be used to do essential configuration of users, groups, roles, system and network services, to monitor the status of your system, or to apply updates. WebYaST can easily be integrated with systems built in Studio, so it's the ideal way to provide a lean administration interface for all kind of software and virtual appliances.

We are proud of our new product, and we hope you'll enjoy it as much as we do. Have a lot of fun with it :-).